They say time moves slowly when you are waiting for something. That a minute reveals its true length when you are watching it pass. That anticipation stretches the clock until each hour feels like a deliberate cruelty.
For Mateo and the Barcelona squad in Manchester, this was completely false.
The day before the match disappeared.
Not gradually — not in the way of a long afternoon that eventually becomes evening and eventually becomes night. It disappeared the way certain days disappear when they are full enough and moving enough that the mind never gets the chance to look at the clock and register how much time has actually passed. One moment Mateo was at the breakfast table in the hotel café, the morning light coming through the tall windows, the quiet organised energy of a squad eating before a training day. The next moment — or what felt like the next moment, though several hours had been consumed in between — he was on a bus heading toward Old Trafford.
The video call with his father had happened somewhere in the space between breakfast and departure. David King had answered from the kitchen of the restaurant — that much was immediately obvious, the background giving him away before he said a word. He was covered in grease in the specific, comfortable way of a man who had been in the middle of something and had answered the phone anyway, his apron carrying the evidence of the morning's work, a cloth tucked into his waistband.
"Where are you?" he said, squinting at the screen.
Mateo turned the phone to show him the view from the window.
His father's face went through several stages in quick succession.
David King had grown up supporting Manchester United with the particular, specific devotion of someone who had chosen their team early and had never found a reason to reconsider. This was not casual interest. This was a relationship that had survived bad seasons and managerial changes and transfer windows that had produced more disappointment than satisfaction, the kind of loyalty that exists independent of results because it was never really about results. He knew Old Trafford the way you know a place you have seen a thousand times in photographs and broadcasts and have always meant to visit and somehow not yet managed — intimately, theoretically, with the slightly unreal quality of something that existed more vividly in the imagination than it had yet existed in person.
And now his son was there.
"Is that—"
"Yeah."
"That's Old Trafford—"
"Yeah, Dad."
What followed was less a conversation and more a running commentary from David King delivered at the volume and pace of a man who had forgotten he was at work and in a kitchen. Someone came into frame behind him at one point — a person Mateo did not recognise, presumably one of the newer staff members his uncle had been hiring — and took the pan that David had apparently abandoned mid-use without any apparent awareness that he had abandoned it. David did not notice. He was watching the tour.
The documentary crew, who had attached themselves to Mateo's call at some point in the first few minutes, were visibly delighted by all of this.
Old Trafford had history.
Mateo had been told this in various forms since the moment the destination had been mentioned — by staff members, by teammates who had been here before, by the general tone of the conversation around the visit. History. The word kept appearing.
He understood what they meant once he was inside.
But the history of Old Trafford was — complicated, he found, walking through it. It was the history of a place that had been something enormous and had not quite caught up with the ongoing obligation of remaining enormous. The stadium was clean — that was clear, the maintenance was present and consistent — but clean and current were different things, and Old Trafford had the particular quality of somewhere that had last been substantially updated in a decade that was now some distance in the past.
The corridors had the right bones. The scale was right. The weight of it — the sense of accumulated occasion, of how many things had happened in this building — was genuinely present and genuinely impressive. But set against the Allianz Arena, where everything felt deliberately modern, or the Parc des Princes, where the renovation had given the old structure a current face, Old Trafford felt like a place that had decided some time ago that its history was sufficient and had been waiting for someone to disagree with that decision.
There was a jacuzzi.
Mateo looked at it for a moment.
The jacuzzi had the aura of a piece of equipment that had been installed at a point in time when it represented a significant investment in player welfare and had been maintained since then in the technical sense — clean, functional — while somehow also managing to look as though it predated several of his teammates by a meaningful margin.
He kept walking.
The pitch, when they reached it, was different. The pitch was excellent — the kind of excellent that spoke to specific, ongoing, professional care, the grass dense and even and precisely cut, the surface doing what a surface was supposed to do without requiring any accommodation from the people using it. Whatever compromises the rest of the stadium was navigating, the pitch was not among them.
Training was light. It was always going to be light — you did not put full output into the day before a Champions League semi-final, you moved enough to stay ready and not enough to take anything away from what was needed tomorrow. They went through the shapes, ran through some set pieces, kept the legs moving without asking them for anything they would need to answer for later.
After, the group split.
The larger portion — the majority — went back toward the bus, back toward the hotel, back toward the business of preparing rest and meals and the quiet management of the hours before a match. The smaller group, which included Mateo, headed in a different direction.
The Etihad was calling for a media obligation.
The city between the two stadiums was alive with something.
Mateo watched it from the bus window with the specific attention of someone who has been in enough cities before big matches to know what that quality looks like and wants to see how Manchester expressed it. The answer was: thoroughly.
Blue was everywhere. Not the scattered, individual blue of supporters going about their days — the organised, deliberate blue of a city that had been claimed by a football occasion and had accepted the claiming entirely. City shirts moved through the streets in clusters, the number 10 appearing repeatedly, the names of players Mateo knew from the opposite side of pitches he had stood on visible on backs and shoulders everywhere he looked.
The food stalls had appeared at the intersections the way they always appeared before big matches, selling things in club colours. Banners had gone up on certain buildings — some official, some clearly not, the enthusiasm of individuals who had decided a specific wall needed to say something about tomorrow. Groups of people moved with the particular purposeful energy of supporters navigating a city that had temporarily become theirs.
Manchester had a football culture.
Mateo was not going to pretend otherwise — it would have been both inaccurate and ungenerous. The city's relationship with football was old and genuine and specific, the kind that had developed over generations and had the depth to show for it. He watched it passing the window with real interest, noting it, giving it its due.
It was rich. Genuinely rich.
He would still put Barcelona's culture above it. He was aware that this was a biased opinion and stood by it anyway.
But above both of them — above anywhere he had been, above any footballing culture he had encountered in his seventeen years — was Rio de Janeiro.
The memory arrived unbidden, which was the best way for memories to arrive because it meant they were genuine rather than performed. The youth competition trip — he must have been twelve or thirteen, the exact year refusing to surface — and the city receiving them like the city had opinions about football that it wanted to share with everyone immediately.
It had been unlike anything before or since. Not the professional football of stadiums and matchdays and organised crowds — the football of everywhere, of every surface, of people who had grown up understanding the ball as something closer to a language than a sport. He remembered an old woman — genuinely old, grey-haired, moving with the careful ease of someone managing a body that had been in use for a long time — who had received a ball that had rolled near her on the street and had, without breaking her conversation, juggled it three times and sent it back with the inside of her foot, all without looking down. The person she was talking to had not even paused their sentence.
The city understood football in a way that went beneath culture and approached something more essential. He had never found another word for it.
His mind came back to Manchester when the bus slowed.
Outside the window, a short black man was kneeling on the pavement in a posture that suggested intense engagement with something at ground level. Mateo looked at what the something was and found that it was a dog — a medium-sized one of indeterminate breed, very much involved in whatever was happening, equally intense — and that the man and the dog appeared to be in the middle of what could only be described as a barking exchange. The man would produce a sound. The dog would respond. The man would respond to the response. There was a rhythm to it that suggested this was not a first encounter.
Two cameras were pointed at the scene from slightly different angles.
Mateo stared.
He wiped his eyes once with the back of his hand, as though the gesture might change what his eyes were reporting.
It did not.
"What," he said, to no one.
He watched for another several seconds. The exchange between the man and the dog was ongoing, both parties apparently committed.
Is that for a film? The thought arrived. Then, following it: What kind of plot requires you to do that though?
He laughed — quietly, to himself, the laugh of someone encountering something they could not fully explain and had decided to simply accept. The bus moved. The man and the dog and their cameras disappeared behind them.
He faced forward.
The Etihad, when it appeared, was a different proposition from Old Trafford entirely.
This was a building that knew what decade it was in. The exterior had the clean, deliberate quality of something designed recently by people who understood how stadiums would be used and seen and experienced — not just on matchdays but in the media, in photographs, in the visual language of modern football. It sat in its surroundings with the confidence of something that had been placed there with intention.
The cameras outside the bus windows were already there before they pulled up — the media presence of a Champions League semi-final arriving ahead of the match itself, the machinery of the occasion already running. People were gathered in the surrounding areas in the way people gather before big things — not in a crowd yet, but in the early-gathering way that contained the blueprint of the crowd that would be there tomorrow.
Inside, the media obligations took the shape they always took. Questions, first — the organised version, the press conference format, microphones and notepads and the particular vocabulary of pre-match journalism, every question aimed at extracting something quotable while the answer was designed to be informative without being useful to the opposition. Mateo answered his share with the ease of someone who had been doing this long enough to have found the register — honest enough to be engaging, careful enough to protect anything that actually mattered.
Photographs. A short promotional video, the kind that would be cut and distributed and placed into the spaces where marketing materials went, him in the Barcelona kit with the stadium as backdrop, moving through the requested angles with the patience of someone who had learned that this was part of the job and the job was worth doing.
Thirty minutes.
Then they were back in the bus.
The rest of the day moved at the same pace as the morning — which was to say, faster than it should have.
Back at the hotel: lunch, the team gathered in the dining room, the conversation lighter than the occasion outside might have suggested, the particular skill of professional athletes at not allowing the magnitude of tomorrow to eat today. Then rooms, the afternoon belonging to each player to manage as they saw fit — and fit, in the collective vocabulary of a squad the day before a Champions League semi-final, meant a fairly predictable range of activities.
Mateo played FIFA for a while. He was not alone in this. The room he shared with Pedri had briefly become a venue for two additional players who had appeared at the door with controllers and expressions that asked a question they did not need to ask out loud.
He slept — the afternoon nap that was less luxury than necessity, the body claiming what the previous night's late arrival had not fully provided.
He stretched, using the space in the room in the specific way of someone who had been told by multiple people over multiple years that stretching was important and had eventually, reluctantly, come to believe them.
He watched something on his phone — he could not have said afterward with any confidence what it was, some combination of video content that passed the time without requiring the kind of attention that would have competed with what was quietly running in the background of his mind.
He ate dinner with the team. The mood at the table was the particular mood of a group of people who had done this before and knew what the night before a big match was supposed to feel like and were navigating it accordingly — present, focused, not heavy, not light, somewhere in the managed middle space of professional preparation.
Night came.
Outside the hotel, the noise had started.
Manchester City supporters had found them — or had always known where they were and had chosen this point in the evening to make their presence felt. The sounds came through in waves: chanting, singing, the percussion of people who wanted the opposition to hear them and were succeeding. Mateo heard it from his room, assessed it, and reached for his noise-cancelling headphones with the calm of someone crossing an item off a list.
The hotel went to sleep.
Or came as close to sleep as a hotel can come when it contains a squad of footballers the night before a match of this size, which is a qualified and imperfect version of sleep but sufficient for the purpose.
May 5th, 2021.
The day arrived.
It arrived the way it had to arrive — without ceremony, without announcement, simply and completely there when the alarm went off and the light through the curtains confirmed that the previous day had finished and the new one had started and the match that had been tomorrow was now today.
Mateo lay in his bed for the first moments of it and looked at the ceiling.
Today.
Then he got up.
The morning moved through its stages with the rhythm of a matchday that had been rehearsed across the season — the specific sequence of a day built not around living but around arriving at a specific point in the best possible condition. The team breakfast, quieter than the previous morning, the conversation more internal, each player already moving toward the version of themselves that would be needed tonight. The team meeting — Koeman at the front, the tactical reminders delivered for the last time before they would become irrelevant and only the match itself would matter, the shapes and the instructions and the names of the City players to be aware of, all of it going in one final time.
A walk. The kind that served no physical purpose but gave the body something to do with the energy that had nowhere else to go yet.
Lunch — carefully managed, the timing of it calculated backward from kickoff, the food chosen for what it would provide rather than what it tasted like, though the team's nutritional standards had long since made the two things compatible.
Naps that were attempted with varying degrees of success.
The kit laid out. Boots checked. The personal pre-match rituals of twenty-odd individuals performed in the privacy of rooms and corners and the quiet spaces that each person found for themselves before the collective thing began.
Then the bus.
The Etihad appeared different today from how it had appeared yesterday.
Yesterday it had been a building. Today it was an event.
Mateo watched it from the bus window as they approached — the crowd already substantial around it, the blue of City shirts dominant but not total, the Barcelona red and blue present in a sizable contingent that had made the journey and was making itself heard. The noise reached the bus before the stadium did, coming through the glass and the engine in a muffled but unmistakable form, the sound of sixty thousand people in the process of becoming a crowd rather than a collection of individuals.
He watched a father lifting a child onto his shoulders to see over the crowd ahead of them. He watched a group of City supporters in full kit moving together with the particular energy of people arriving somewhere they had been looking forward to all week. He saw the Barcelona contingent — louder than their numbers might have suggested, the way travelling supporters always were, the acoustic equation of people who had come a long way and intended to be heard.
The bus moved through it slowly.
Mateo looked at the stadium. At the lights already on, the sky behind it darkening toward the specific shade of blue that European nights carried.
His heart was doing something.
Not fear. Not anxiety in the shapeless, unfocused way of something you cannot prepare for. Something cleaner than that — the particular elevation of a system that has recognised what is coming and is already beginning to arrange itself for it.
7:00 PM UK time.
One hour.
...
"Man City looks delightful."
Micah Richards said it with the particular reverence of a man who had played the game and understood what he was looking at — leaning forward slightly, his eyes moving across the lineup graphic on the screen beside them, reading each name as though tasting it.
"Kevin De Bruyne. Silva. Mahrez. Foden. Fernandinho. Gündoğan." He paused. "Walker. Dias. Stones. Zinchenko. Ederson." He sat back. "Wow." The word came out on an exhale. "The squad just looks good. Vision, power, the midfield—" He shook his head. "They're putting four midfielders out there. They're just going to pull the strings, aren't they." It was not quite a question. "The whole thing is just — it's a machine."
He looked across at Henry.
"But Thierry — talk me through this City lineup. Properly."
Henry looked at the graphic. Looked at Micah. Then back at the graphic.
"You've said it all," he said.
The studio erupted. Kate Wright's laugh came first — sharp and genuine — and Jamie Carragher followed immediately, and Micah himself went, the self-deprecating laugh of a man who had walked into something and had nobody to blame but himself. Even the crew off-camera could be heard somewhere in the building.
Henry smiled, satisfied, and said nothing further.
"Okay, okay—" Micah waved it down, still smiling. "But seriously."
"Seriously," Jamie said, leaning in with the energy of someone who had been waiting for an opening. "Micha — City look that good. You said it yourself. Do you want to change your prediction? Because there is no shame in it. Honestly."
The table looked at Micah.
Micah looked at the lineup one more time. His expression moved through something — the genuine consideration of a man who had gone out on a limb and was now being handed a ladder back.
"I won't lie," he said. "I'm tempted. Manchester City look really, really good tonight."
"Hmm," said Jamie and Kate simultaneously, with different inflections.
Micah straightened. Settled. Made his decision.
"But I'm good," he said. "I'm comfortable with Barcelona."
"You're comfortable," Jamie repeated, in the tone of someone deciding how to feel about a word.
"Comfortable and confident," Micah said.
"Right." Jamie turned to the table. "Well — I think City still have this. Both legs. Clean sweep, home and away. I've said it and I'll keep saying it."
Kate turned to look at him.
"I have one question," she said.
Jamie and Henry and Micah all looked at her.
"Just one," she said pleasantly.
"Go on then," Jamie said.
"Did you watch the first leg?"
Micah's laugh arrived before he could contain it — loud and full, the laugh of someone who had been waiting for that exact sentence and had known it was coming and had still found it funny when it arrived. Henry was smiling. Even Jamie was smiling, the slightly reluctant smile of someone who recognised a good point being made at his expense.
"I get it, I get it—" Jamie held his hands up. "I watched the first half. I watched the kid. He looked — fine, yes, he looked scary, I'll give you that." He lowered his hands. "But are we still talking about the first half of the first leg? Is that where we are right now?"
"We're talking about it," Micah said, "because it's what everyone is talking about."
"Because it was something," Kate said.
"It was something," Micah confirmed.
"He was seventeen years old in a Champions League semi-final," Kate continued. "Running at their defence—"
"I know what happened—"
"And creating the only goal of the—"
"I know what happened, Kate—"
"Then why are you talking like it didn't?"
The back and forth had the rhythm of people who had done this many times and enjoyed it — the overlapping voices, the pointed wit, the undercurrent of genuine engagement beneath the competitive surface. The kind of television that worked because the people making it were actually interested in what they were arguing about.
"Look—" Jamie composed himself. "What I'm saying is: great performance, fine, one for the archives, brilliant kid, however many superlatives you want to use. But what also happened is they lost. They went to the camp Nou — Their own home — and they lost two-one. So the question is not was the first half good, the question is what happens tonight, and tonight City are at home, City have the advantage on aggregate, and City—"
"Have a team that looks delightful," Micah said.
"Thank you. Yes."
Kate looked at both of them. Then she turned to Henry.
"Thierry. You've been very quiet."
Henry, who had been sitting with the composed patience of someone who knew their moment would come and was not going to hurry it, looked at her.
"What do you want me to say," he said.
"What do you think."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he looked at Jamie.
"Though it pains me," he said, with the careful delivery of a man choosing his words very precisely, "I agree with Jamie. City are the clear favorites."
Jamie pointed at him. "Thank you—"
"But." Henry said it simply, and the word landed with enough weight that Jamie's pointing finger came back down.
Kate smiled.
Henry looked at the table.
"Is this over between Manchester City and Barcelona?" He paused. Let the question sit. Then shook his head. "No."
"Based on?" Jamie said.
"The home advantage — look, yes, it matters in some matches, maybe it matters a little here, I don't know. But truthfully?" He tilted his head. "Truthfully, no. It doesn't matter enough." He stopped. Seemed to be working out how to say the next part. "Maybe — maybe it's because I've also been at that level—"
He stopped again.
Micah leaned forward. "Don't be shy. Say your stuff."
Henry laughed — the slightly self-conscious laugh of a man being given permission he wasn't sure he needed. The others laughed with him.
"Go on," Kate said. "You've earned it."
"Alright." He settled. "Players at that level — the real top level, the absolute top — they don't care that they're in someone else's city. They don't care that the fans are loud. They don't care that the stadium is full and that everyone there wants them to fail." He said it not with arrogance but with the straightforward certainty of someone describing something he had personal experience of. "You just — stop it. Stop saying it's going to be too loud. Stop saying the home crowd will lift City. Players at that level have heard loud before. They've played in loud before. It doesn't move them the way people think it moves them."
He paused.
"With all of that said." His voice shifted — more measured now, the analysis taking over from the feeling. "With all of that said, the question remains: can they actually beat them? Can Barcelona go to the Etihad tonight and get the result they need?"
He let the question sit for a moment, the studio quiet.
"There was something I mentioned—" He stopped. "Actually, I think it wasn't here. Was it on Neville's podcast?"
Jamie pointed at him. "The podcast. Yeah. I know what you're talking about."
"Right." Henry sat forward. "What we were discussing — what I was saying — is how gruelling it is to carry the ball on every single action. Not some actions. Not most. Every single action." He let that land. "Because when you're the player that makes everything happen — the player that opponents build their entire defensive plan around neutralising — every touch you take is contested. Every run is tracked. Every time you're in possession someone is making a decision about you. The energy cost of that over ninety minutes—" He shook his head. "People don't appreciate how much that takes."
He reached for his phone.
"I saw a stat — this graphic, on Instagram—"
Kate's face moved.
Jamie immediately looked at the ceiling.
Micah put his hand over his mouth.
"What?" Henry said.
"Instagram," Micah said, through the hand.
"It's a stat on the amount of carries goals, chances created, assist, every offensive action since his debut—"
"Thierry Henry," Jamie said. "On Instagram."
"Can we—" Henry looked to the side. "Can someone put this on the screen? Please?" He held the phone up in the general direction of the production team.
A producer moved with the specific speed of someone who understood that this was a good television moment and did not intend to let it pass.
"Thank you," Henry said, with dignity.
Thirty seconds.
"It's showing," someone called.
Henry stood. Moved toward the large display screen that had materialised behind him. He looked at it for a moment — at the scatter graph filling the display, the axes representing progressive carries, chances created, goal contributions, the full attacking output mapped across the landscape of the current season's players.
He pointed to a dense cluster in the middle-left of the graph.
"There," he said. "That large cluster — that's your average decent professional footballer. The baseline. Most players in most leagues, doing good work, contributing meaningfully, clustered right there."
He moved his finger up and to the right.
"Then here—" A sparser region, fewer dots, the dots further apart. "Your exceptional players. The ones who separate themselves. Your De Bruynes. Your Messis — well, Messi is out here further—" He moved further. "Your Ronaldos. Mbappé. Lewandowski." He named them with the respect of someone naming peers, not legends to be worshipped. "These are the players the game is built around right now."
He paused.
Then he scrolled.
The graph shifted — the existing points remaining, the scale expanding. The exceptional cluster that had seemed far from the average was now somewhere in the middle of a larger picture.
Micah had stopped laughing. He was watching the screen.
Henry scrolled further up.
And there — at the very top of the expanded graph, separated from everything below it by a visible gap, a single white dot.
Alone.
Henry looked at it. Said nothing for a moment.
Then he shook his head — slowly, the private movement of someone who had seen something and found it genuinely surprising despite having expected to see it.
"Then there is Mateo King."
The studio was quiet.
Jamie let out a low whistle, long and descending, the sound of a man receiving information that has arrived in a way that makes it impossible to dismiss.
Henry turned from the screen and looked at the table.
"So — to the question of whether Barcelona can win tonight." He spread his hands slightly, the gesture of someone who has made their case and does not feel the need to add to it. "I don't think I need to answer that, do I?"
He sat back down.
Micah had a smile on his face — the wide, settled, deeply satisfied smile of a man who had picked a team and was watching the evidence gather around his decision like weather around a mountain.
"Oh," he said, leaning back in his chair. "I am very happy with my pick."
...
While the CBS studio and a dozen others like it buzzed with prediction and analysis and the particular electricity of television that knew it was about to become irrelevant the moment the real thing started, the clock kept moving.
It always kept moving.
"AINA — THE MATCH IS STARTING—"
Olivia's voice carried through the apartment with the full, unguarded volume of someone who had forgotten, in the moment, that there were people in other units on other floors who might have opinions about this.
She was on the sofa, the television already on, the broadcast already into its pre-match sequence — the cameras sweeping the stadium, the crowd already at its full noise, the commentators beginning the particular kind of speaking they did in the minutes before kickoff when they had to fill time without quite starting yet.
"I'M COMING—"
Aina's voice came back from down the hall, carrying the specific energy of someone who had been doing something else and was now not doing it anymore, the sound of movement following immediately — quick footsteps, the sound of something being set down with more haste than care.
She appeared in the doorway, slightly breathless, settling onto the sofa beside Olivia with the focused speed of someone arriving exactly in time and knowing it.
On screen, the players were walking out.
Both sets of them — the City players and the Barcelona players — emerging from the tunnel in the particular procession of a Champions League matchday, the badge on the sleeve, the anthem still playing, the cameras finding faces and holding them.
Olivia watched them come.
"Wow," she said. Not loudly — more to herself, the word arriving without particular intention. "They look so serious." She watched the Barcelona players in their line. "Even more than last match, isn't it?"
"Well," Aina said, settling back, pulling her legs up beneath her in the way she sat when she was committing to something for the duration. "It's the Champions League."
Olivia looked at her. "I know that. But even compared to the last one—"
"This is the semi-final," Aina said. "Second leg. They need to overturn a result." She thought about how to explain it — not talking down, just finding the right size for the thing. "Okay — put it this way." She turned to face Olivia properly. "This competition — if they win tonight they go to the final. And if they win the final, they win the whole thing. The Champions League. Which for football is—" She paused, finding the analogy. "It's like, for you, winning the Grammy for Album of the Year."
Olivia's eyes widened slightly.
"It's that big?"
"It's that big."
Olivia looked back at the screen. At the players still in their lines, the anthem finishing, the cameras moving across faces that were carrying the weight of exactly what Aina had just described.
"Wow," she said again. A different wow from the first one — more textured, more informed, the word doing more work now that she understood what it was sitting on top of.
The teams were taking their positions. The referee and his assistants moving into place. The crowd in the Etihad settling into the specific quality of noise that stadiums produce in the final moments before kickoff — not the sustained roar of a goal or a chance, but the loaded, anticipatory hum of sixty thousand people holding something they haven't released yet.
The camera found the centre circle.
Mateo was there.
Standing at the spot, about to take the kickoff, his head slightly down in the way it went down sometimes in the last moments before things started — not dropped, not defeated, just inward, the last private second before the public thing began. The Barcelona kit vivid under the Etihad's floodlights. The number nine on his back.
Olivia looked at him through the screen.
She looked at him the way you look at someone you have seen in a kitchen making food and laughing at their own jokes, and then you look at them in a different context entirely and find that the person is the same and the context is the only thing that has changed, and that the combination of the two pictures — the kitchen and the floodlit pitch — produces something that neither picture produces on its own.
The referee raised his whistle.
Olivia leaned forward slightly, unconsciously, the way the body moves toward things it is invested in before the mind has decided to move.
"Good luck," she said.
Quietly. Just to the screen, just to the image of him standing there in the centre of the Etihad with the match about to begin, just to the space between her and a television in an apartment in Barcelona while he stood sixty thousand people deep in Manchester.
He couldn't hear her.
She knew he couldn't hear her.
She said it anyway.
The whistle blew.
A/N
If you want to read chapters ahead with uploads and to support me subscribe to my Patreon below There is also a picture of how mateo looks like posted and later there would be votes and all on the site some you wont need to pay to vote but you can if you want to support me thanks
patreon.com/David_Adetola
Thank You your support is greatly appreciated thank you all
I've also created a Discord channel to make communication easier, where I'll post updates, cover/character pictures for all my books, and more. Here's the link:
https://discord.gg/W5P9MRa3 (New discord link)